Days of the Dead

In 1977 it had nearly always been possible to see Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, the two volcanoes which loomed over the city, but Docherty sensed that such clarity was gone for ever. ‘Progress,’ he murmured to himself.

He followed the Paseo as it swung west along the northern edge of the vast Chapultepec Park, and five minutes later he was entering the suburb from which the park derived its name. ‘Hill of the locust’ was the translation, he remembered, and the name seemed appropriate enough – the people who lived around here probably hadn’t noticed Mexico’s economic crisis, much less suffered from it.

Las Lomas de Chapultepec, a few kilometres further out, seemed even richer, and its shady avenues seemed depressingly free of traffic. He was going to stick out like a sore thumb, Docherty thought, not least because nearly every car he saw seemed to be a BMW or a Mercedes.

He found Toscono’s house without difficulty and immediately noticed the coils of razor wire interwoven with the tumbling bougainvillea. Driving on up the hill, he found a small park, and from this relatively innocent vantage-point he was able to get a good idea of the compound’s layout and take a sneak shot with his Polaroid. The camera’s definition might not be that good, but it was quick, and there was no need to involve a processing firm.

The place didn’t look any more inviting on the way down. He had seen no sign of dogs but that didn’t mean much; the wire was crossable but the neighbourhood was far too quiet, and probably well watched – in countries like Mexico the police had a clearer idea of who paid their wages. There had to be better ways of getting to Toscono than over that wall.

Docherty drove thoughtfully back into the centre of the city, trying to ignore the rattling noise somewhere beneath him. On the edge of the Zona Rosa he found an outdoor café which put together a passable chicken torta, and then sat in La Ciudadela square for an hour or more by way of a siesta. At about three he walked up Balderas to Toscono’s office address, which turned out to be a ten-storey glass tower. He waited outside until the lobby receptionist was busy with someone else’s query, then walked in and examined the plaques on the wall behind him. As far as he could tell, Malvinas Import-Export was the sole occupant of the fifth floor.

He walked back outside and circled the building, noting the entrance to the underground car park. A car was just going in, and it seemed that the only entry requirement was money. Docherty strolled down Balderas, collected the Golf and drove back to the office building. The man in the booth at the entrance to the underground park took his pesos without even looking up from his newspaper, and he was in.

There were two levels and he examined them both before parking on the upper, along one of the side walls with a good view of the lift doors. Then he settled down to wait, wishing he’d had the sense to bring a magazine or book with them. The car’s radio worked after a fashion, but there seemed to be only an unrelenting diet of Latino pop on offer, and he would rather have listened to country music. Well, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration.

Between four-thirty and five the car park began to empty, and Docherty became worried that only his and Toscono’s cars would be left, always assuming that the Argentinian was in his office. After all, he could be at the races, at a casino, or even, to judge from the tone of the woman on the telephone, in the arms of a mistress.

And then there he was – the slightly plump, slightly balding, impeccably dressed man from Gustavo’s photograph. The man with him looked and acted like a bodyguard, and as they walked straight towards the Golf, Docherty slowly lowered his head below the level of the dashboard.

He didn’t lift it again until he heard the sound of a car starting up. It was the big white BMW about twenty metres to his left, and Toscono himself was in the driving seat, looking pleased with himself. The other man, who was almost a head taller, seemed to be scowling at the world. It was probably something he had picked up at bodyguard school.

Carmen was a few minutes late arriving at the restaurant, but Detective Peña had phoned to say he would be later still. The table he had booked was beside a window, and she sat there with a glass of chilled white wine, thinking about him. In other circumstances, she thought, it was possible that something might have happened between them. Possible but not probable; he might be attracted to her but he was also happily enough married not to act on the attraction.

She had visited Victoria four times now, and each time it had been painful for both of them. Victoria might seem the less affected on the surface, but the fact that she was still hiding in the fiction of dreams suggested a degree of psychological damage which Carmen found almost as distressing as the story which was emerging between the lines of those dreams.

No real names had emerged, either of the people concerned or the place of the girls’ imprisonment. ‘He’ was the ‘Angel of Death’, the men were ‘his men’, the island was just that. The details that emerged – the squelch of a water-bed, the stuttering fan, birdsong through a window – seemed rooted in evasion; they were like a condemned man’s musings on the beauty of rope.

And yet sometimes there was clarity. ‘We all used to play cards in our room,’ Victoria suddenly said in one of their sessions. ‘I can remember Marysa making a joke about him and we all laughed so much…’

Obviously not every moment had been nightmarish, but then they never were. Marysa had always made good jokes, Carmen thought, and found a tear rolling down her own cheek. Seeing Detective Peña zigzagging through the table towards her, she quickly dabbed it away.

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